Birding at the Museum: Great Diorama Artists

Did you know that you can bird-"watch" inside the Museum? Four new videos on amnh.tv introduce viewers to the diversity of bird habitat groups, or dioramas, and the history of ornithology at the Museum. This post highlights the third video, about some of the great bird artists over the years at the Museum.

Throughout the 20th century, artists specializing in birds traveled to the field, where they were able to capture precisely the animals' colors and movements for the background paintings of the Museum’s dioramas.

As long-time exhibition artist Stephen C. Quinn explains in a new video, artists including painters Louis Agassiz Fuertes (at the Museum in the early 20th century) and Francis Lee Jacques (at the Museum from 1924−1942) and taxidermist David Schwendeman (at the Museum from 1959−1987) used their talents to create stunningly real bird scenes throughout the Museum's permanent halls, not only in bird-centric halls like the Hall of Birds of the World and the Sanford Hall of North American Birds but also in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.